I think that the only criticism I can give on the way that the anime creators adapted this manga (from the perspective of someone who hasn’t read it, of course) is the recap at the start of this episode. They’re getting longer and longer now, and this episode just went a bit too far with THREE MINUTES of recap. But then again, it could also just be a way to kill time. Just about everything here was very well planned out, and you can see that a lot of thought went into it. My guess is that when this arc was planned out, it didn’t fit into a full amount of episodes, so who knows whether, instead of dragging the individual scenes on, the creators just put a number of recap minutes at the beginning of each episode.
In any case, I now very much understand why the creators took so much time for the match against Nagoya, even though the rest of the pacing was so much faster. Due to the predictability of this match, they really NEEDED to take their full time to get their point across. And I must say that they handled it very cleverly: all of the previous episodes, while hinting at how this would be the turning point, also kept suggesting that Tatsumi was going for a draw here. Only at the last possible moment did he reveal his strategy, and Tsubaki indeed lived up to his promise by scoring in his signature way.
But even then that doesn’t mean that they won, due to that cliff-hanger: the episode ends with the former star player, dead-set on returning the favour. We here have a guy who is dead set on scoring a goal, which is also a thing that the creators have been building up through the past number of episodes: it’s still nowhere near certain that this will indeed be the ETU’s first win. This effect would entirely have been lost if the match was just played within one episode.
Another upside of this is that we get a lot of insight about the Brazilians here. They’re nowhere near the stereotypes that they were when they first were introduced, they really are formidable and have a lot of insight into the game. What’s also interesting is that this doesn’t even show them at their best: we never really get to see Carlos, the best of the three, shine, because Tatsumi is consciously avoiding him. Most other sports series would have gone for the entire opposite: draw out some sort of confrontation with the most skilled player at the center of the conflict.
Rating: *** (Awesome)
The situation with Nagoya’s “former star” is interesting, because that kind of attitude can take you either of two ways, he can become unpredictable and unstoppable, or he can completely destroy the team dynamic. If he seriously thinks he can play out of position just to snatch a goal, he could create confusion on his own side, and a big hole for ETU to drive through.
I was not expecting to end this episode with 15 minutes remaining on the game clock!
I loved this episode. The way they have involved the Brazilians throughout this arc is great, especially in this episode.
I love this series, but they keep throwing cliffhangers at us. Even though the pacing might be a bit slow now, I become so engrossed in the episode that it’s over before I know it.